Review of the play-yan Micro

I readied the Panasonic 1GB SD card. Before buying that I read the Play-Yan howto guide book at the shop (tachiyomi) and there were some helpful hints interspersed with the commen sense stuff: Using AVIMaker to put your jpegs in there, Nintendo released a "keyfile" to customize, etc.

So I received the Play-Yan Micro and I quickly tested the MP3 player with the Ikaruga soundtrack. The sound was very clear, well about as good as my iPod. Both my GBAMicro and DS handled it without any fault. The mp3 tags showed up correctly in Japanese as well. There was a screen off mode called sleep mode too. I guess the most interesting part about the interface\ (after learning the ins and outs) was the animation control on the little guy. You could make him do hand stands and chorus kicks. Other than that I was disappointed that there wasn't much more control you could have over the playing itself. Of course the basics were covered, but as a power user I always try to see if things are more controllable that they are.
Then I tried the key file and Mario graced my MP3s. It made the Play-Yan Micro feel a lot more intimate and surprisingly satsifying. But that other guy was still present in some of the interface menus. Ugh, go away. Mario only please.

While I was playing around with the mp3 stuff, I installed the Panasonic Media Stage software. I had a couple of anime raws to try, but first off I went with the first episode of Sugar. I did the gimme-now method first: drag the video file onto the application, and hit "convert" with the highest quality settings. And actually the software was sufficient enough to do that. That 24 minute video file took about 24 minutes to encode to ASF, and the file went from 230 MB to 140MB. Moving the encode result to the Play-Yan Micro was as easy as file copying.
However I was disappointed with playing the video. The visual part itself was not too bad. 30 fps on non-action anime like Sugar seemed adequate enough. There were squares that showed up on some scenes, are these called artifacts? But all in all it was clear enough, if not crisp. The audio part was the disappoinment though. First off, ASF format only supports monoaural. Second, the audio sounds muffled. It's not a problem with the hardware because I tried the mp3 player just before and it was good. So it must have been the encoder.

I tried searching the Internet for a better encoder/transcoder. I started with the PSP Video 9 converter but it didn't work and it was generally buggy. I also looked at the 3GP converter but it was shareware so I didn't try using it. Which left me VLC. Unfortunately, it had warnings about expecting only bad quality transcoding and the results I got reflected that. I tried converting the Ikaruga superplays with horrendous results. When the source is mpeg, the transcode went well and the video was ok. When the source was wmv, it was lesser quality. Finally with DiVX ;-) encoded AVIs (ie anime raws) the transcode failed to yield the video part. So if I want to watch anime raws, I need to use the Media Stage junk. Ah disappointing.
Other than that, the video player controls were top notch and a snap to figure out. Press A and hold the left or right to review/fast foward at a higher clip. The player doesn't stutter while doing high speed searches.

Generally speaking, I am not that excited about the Play-Yan Micro. Yeah it shows video but it's hokey. The Media Stage software can't convert many videos at one time and it doesn't encode mp4 (which supports stereo!). As a audio player, yeah it's adequate, but I already have my iPod for that. I suppose I could make a video album with it (showing pictures), but first off it doesn't show still formats of any kind (BMP, TIFF, JPEG, etc), and second, even after converting your still pictures to a video format, when you play it and pause, the screen flashes with an annoying icon right on top of it.

Maybe if I paid money for a good converter I would be more satisified.

So should I buy an encoder? Which one should I try? I don't want to pay more than 50 USD.